How do you make dinosaurs boring?

Back when I was methodically reviewing Marvel Comics from the 1960s in order, I would occasionally have to talk about a story I didn't like. The idea was that I would cover every Marvel Superhero book starting with FF #1 and, as fun as that particular universe is, they did do a clunker from time to time.

I eventually got to a point where I didn't own (either the original or a reprint) a lot of the comics from a particular month, so I phased out that project and began reviewing pretty much randomly chosen comics. That means that I would almost always be talking about comics I enjoy reading--there would rarely be a critical review. And that's just fine. I write this blog in part to celebrate the stuff I like and to pass on my impeccable taste the rest of the world, thus saving civilization.

But every once in awhile, I run across a story that should have been good, but just blows the opportunity. Then I have to vent. I did that a few years ago, when a Charlton comic messed up a chance to make a Phantom/John Paul Jones team-up the epic event it should have been. I usually like Charlton comics, but now I've found a story that messes up a Western gunfighter  vs. dinosaurs story set on a jungle island. Seriously, how do you mess that up?

Kid Montana #36 (September 1962) includes the 10-page story "The Dawn World," tentatively written by Joe Gill and drawn by Pete Morisi. The length is probably one of the problems with the tale. A lot of these pages are needed just for exposition, leaving too little room to flesh out the action stuff.

Kid Montana gets a letter from a lady named Lori who runs a trading post in the swamps of Florida. She's also an archeologist and has a theory that there are floating islands left over from the Ice Age on which ancient flora and fauna might exist. Learning of one of these islands from a local Indian, she hires a steamboat to take her to it, bringing Montana along in case they run into something dangerous.

Well, there is danger afoot. The three-man crew of the boat are actually escaped convicts looking for a hideout AND the island turns out to be thick with dinosaurs. When Montana and Lori are attacked by a carnosaur, it proves to be immune to bullets, but a stick of dynamite works quite nicely.

The page above shows, I think, the problem with "The Dawn World." The art is simply not equal to the task of making the story look appropriately awesome. There are one or two panels that look nice, but the art does not flow effectively from panel to panel and there are far too many close ups and tight shots of the characters. I want to like this story. I really, really want to like it. But it just looks too mundane. A Western gunfighter tossing explosives at a hungry dinosaur should never look mundane.

Anyway, the bad guys give themselves away, shoot and wound Montana, and then run into the jungle when they find out Lori has found pearls.

In another poorly choreographed sequence, the outlaws run into dinosaurs, panic and run back to the boat, where Montana captures them. As they all leave, Montana uses the rest of their dynamite to blow up the island. He does this with Lori's permission--because she's a scientist, by golly, and all good scientists blow up their most important discoveries for no rational reason.

Charlton produced a number of good Westerns, but they dropped the ball this time. They had a gunslinger, a steamboat, a crew of thugs, a pretty girl and an island full of dinosaurs. If you can't mix all that together and come up with a fun story, then you just aren't trying hard enough.

You can read the story yourself online HERE, but I ain't promisin' you won't be wasting your time.

Next week, the Justice League makes a return trip to the 73rd Century.

Cover Cavalcade

An effective and dramatic cover from 1967. Art by Rocco Mastroserio.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Let George Do It: "The House That Jack Built" 10/2/50

George is hired by Lacey Jack, a man he never heard of but who even tough thugs seem to be afraid of. George is asked to watch over Jack's sister, but instead he finds himself racing to prevent a murder.

...or so George thinks.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

The Fourth Gunman

Remember the Ace Doubles? They easily rank among Mankind's greatest achievements. I'm pretty sure they fall between the pyramids and the Great Wall of China on any legitimate list.

Ace began publishing them in 1952 and the line didn't peter out until the late 1970s. They were... well, they were wonderful. Each paperback was two novels in one, printed back-to-back with each novel oriented upside down in relation to the other. So you read one novel, flipped the book upside down and then read the other. Genres published by Ace as Doubles included science fiction & fantasy, detective fiction and Westerns. Aside from the great storytelling featured within each Double, they usually had magnificent cover illustrations.

I've never made a point of collecting the Doubles, but if I have a chance to get my hands on one, I inevitably will do so. So when I recently had a chance to acquire the 1958 Double featuring two Westerns, I did so.

As of my writing this post, I haven't yet read Slick on the Draw, by Tom West, but I have read The Fourth Gunman, by Merle Constiner.

I was not familiar with Constiner (1902-1979), who has 25 separate novels (mostly Westerns) listed under his name on Goodreads. But--even though I'm supposed to be something of a scholar about such things, I don't feel too bad about that. There were so many Westerns being churned out in the 1940s and 1950s, it's pretty much impossible to be familiar with them all.

Costiner, it turns out, was good at Westerns. The protagonist of The Fourth Gunman is George Netfield, who owns a saloon in the town of Kirksville. When the novel opens, Netfield is already hip-deep in trouble. He's become aware that a local ranch owner is looking to gain control of both a second ranch and the feeding station in town. (The area where cattle are held before being loaded onto trains.) The rancher would then use these resources to move stolen cattle through the town and make a lot of money. The local sheriff is corrupt and on the rancher's payroll, so there's no point in looking to the law for help.

Netfield does not want this to happen. He is, essentially, a very moral man who likes his town and doesn't want to see it corrupted. But this attitude gets him on a hit list. And, as the novel opens, his barkeeper, who is also his best friend, is murdered.

Netfield learns that there are four gunman in town and that one of them--named Kruger--is particularly dangerous. But Netfield is not a man to back down. He's also pretty good with a six gun himself, as he demonstrates when he kills one of the men who killed his friend.

The story spreads out from here. There's plenty of action and Costiner definitely knows how to effectively describe a gun battle. A particularly interesting one takes place early in the novel, when Netfield and another ally are being stalked through a lumberyard, with stacks of wood forming a maze around them.

Costiner also introduces several fun supporting characters: A young man named Wingate who was cheated out of his small farm, but proves very skilled with a rifle; and an aging gunfighter who should probably have outgrown his nickname, the "Turtle Creek Kid," but never did. Both these guys affect the story in surprising ways.

I also really enjoy how Costiner uses the gunman Kruger as the scariest villain. He's very much an unseen threat. Neither we nor Netfield meets him in person until the climatic gunfight. But Kruger is effectively built up as a serious threat throughout the novel, so we feel us presence hanging over all other events even before he finally shows himself.

That climatic battle, by the way, is exciting and satisfying as well as ironic in how it plays out.

So I've run across yet another writer whose works I want to read more of. For years, I've had a plan to meet and marry a wealthy heiress so that I can spend my life reading everything I want to read. I really need to get that plan rolling.

A Quick Trip to the 73rd Century

Justice League of America #138 (January 1977) shows us that being heroic can sometimes cause more problems than it solves. Especially if the problem being solved didn't even exist in the first place.

The Justice League satallite receives a surprise visit from the planet Rann. Alanna, the wife of Adam Strange, has traveled 4 light years because she needs someone to save her husband.

Adam Strange's deal--as most readers here probably know--was getting bounced back and forth between Earth and Rann (which orbits around Alpha Centauri) by zeta beams. Not long before this issue, he'd been able to settle permanently on Rann and finally marry the woman he loved. But now he's getting zapped back to Earth again--while also being carried forward in time to the 73rd Century. He's having a harder and harder time battling various threats to future Earth.

So Alanna goes to the League for help. Superman and Flash, both able to casually time travel, soon arrive in the 73rd Century along with Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Batman. Once there, they encounter that century's Green Lantern for Sector 2814.

They soon encounter one of the threats that has been giving Adam a hard time. But its not a threat. The fireball plummeting from the sky is actually a 73rd Century streat cleaning device. Which means the citizens of that country have simply gotten used to a fireball plunging towards them every day. The future is weird.

When Adam shows up to stop this "threat," his efforts simply cause damage. And the corrupt Zeta Beams infusing Adam have both made him unable to think things through and made him powerful enough to be a threat even to Superman.

By the way, Dick Dillon's art is superb in this issue. I especially like the panels above in which future Green Lantern and Aquaman double-team Adam in a valiant effort to make Aquaman seem useful in a fight not taking place in the ocean. 

Typically, Batman is the only hero there who comes up with a plan other than "everyone hit Adam Strange." He manages to stay one step ahead of Adam's ray gun, which eventually drains Adam of the corrupt Zeta energy, snapping him back to normal.

Written by Cary Bates, "Adam Strange--Puppet of Time" is a wonderful story containing several really fun ideas. The fight between Adam and the League is well-choreographed and I like the design of future G.L.

But despite the happy ending, this isn't really a stand-alone tale. The next issue, the five Leaguers who traveled into the future will find themselves fading from reality. Why? How?

Well, next week we'll pause for me to vent about an old Charlton story that commits the grevious sin of making dinosaurs boring. But in two weeks, we'll pay another visit to the 73rd Century.

Cover Cavalcade

From 1971: A breathtakingly awesome cover by George Wilson.

Friday's Favorite OTR

I Deal in Crime: "The Abigail Murray Case" 9/27/47

Private eye Ross Dolan is hired to drive a prime and proper elderly schoolteacher across town. Why does she need a P.I. for that? Because someone has just threatened to kill her!

Click HERE to listen or download.

Cosmic Cube

Read/Watch 'em In Order #89

We continue our trip through the August 1939 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories with "Cosmic Cube," a story written by a fan as part of a contest. The author is Graph Waldeyer, who went on to write 4 other published SF short stories during the 1940s. I have no information on how he ended up being named Graph.

"Cosmic Cube" is a neat little story. The protagonist is a scientific genius named Herbert Monroe, who is directly compared to Sherlock Holmes. Monroe is a scientific detective who's "field was the cosmic scene, rather than mundane crime."  So he won't solve your murder, but he will figure out how to save the planet if the need arise. He even has his Watson, a friend named Rob Gilton.

The story is set in a space opera future, in which Earth has waged a successful war against the Venusians. But now there's a bigger threat threatening the planet. A giant cube--as large as a sun--is tumbling towards Earth.

Monroe is the only person who knows how to destroy the cube before the Earth collides with it. But his solution is based on a theory so fantastic that Monroe knows there's a good chance that he'll be dismissed as a madman.

His theory proves to be true, but I don't think I'll even hint at it. The story has a really fun twist to it that I don't want to spoil. You can find the magazine online HERE, so you can read it yourself.

After "Cosmic Cube," there's a surprisingly difficult science quiz. For example:

People living in New York partake of the following velocities:

___ mile per second, due to the diurnal revolution of the Earth.

___ miles per second, due to the annual revolution of the Earth around the sun.

___ miles per second, due to the translation of the Solar System toward Vega.

___ miles per second, due to the rotation of the galaxy.

Gee whiz, the science fiction pulps might have occasionally run silly stories, but no one can say they didn't think their readers were reasonably smart.

Graveyard of Stagecoaches

Somebody is rustling stagecoaches. Not just robbing them and their passengers, but stealing the entire stagecoach after forcing the rider and passengers to disembark. And the oddest thing is that each stagecoach's tracks simply disappear when a posse tries to trail the stolen vehicle.

This is the situation Roy Rogers rides into in the tale "Graveyard of Stagecoaches," which appeared in Dell's Western Roundup #2 (1953). The art is by Mike Arens and the writer is uncredited.

Roy is briefly mistaken for one of the outlaws, but soon establishes himself as a good guy. He meets the owner of the stagecoach line--pretty young Maggie Temple who has run the business since her dad died. Maggie is now up to 20 missing stagecoaches and her business is--not surprisingly--in trouble.

Roy, of course, sticks around to help. This leads to a couple of attempts on his life, but he soon begins to harbor some suspicions as to what is actually going on.

The villain is a thug with the highly appropriate name of Hog Garber, who was sent to prison by Maggie's dad. He's arranging to hijack the stagecoaches and then uses a hand-car on an old railroad spur to transport them to an abandoned mine. His henchmen go along with it for a share in the profits of the loot taken from the coaches. 

Hog's motive? "I've watched these coaches slowly rotting month after month...just like I rotted in jail! Sometimes I come here at night an' prowl among th' dead coaches. I get a funny feelin'... a good feelin'."

In other words, Hog is Crazy Pants. But don't tell him that to his face. One of his henchmen does that and gets shot for it.

In the end, Roy tracks Hog to the graveyard of stagecoaches. There's a brief but nifty chase over the tops of the coaches (I would have loved to see this scene in one of Roy's movies), then Hog crashes through the rotted roof of a coach, into a nest of rattlesnakes. Ouch.

This is a fun story. Like many B-movie cowboy tales, it effectively combines elements from the detective genre with Western elements, making for a strong plot. And Hog is an unusual and effective villain.

You can read this one online HERE.  Or you can read it while its set to music:

Next week, we'll visit with the Justice League as they follow Adam Strange into the 73rd Century.

Cover Cavalcade

An exciting and eye-catching cover from 1972. The artist is uncredited.